Starship Titanic

The legendary and gigantic Starship Titanic was a majestic and luxurious cruise
liner launched from the great shipbuilding asteroid complexes of Artifactovol.
It was sensationally beautiful, staggeringly huge and more pleasantly equipped
than any ship in history, but it had the misfortune to be built in the very
earliest days of Improbability Physics, long before this difficult and cussed
branch of knowledge was fully, or at all, understood.

The designers and engineers decided, in their innocence, to build a prototype
Improbability Field into it, which was meant, supposedly, to ensure that it
was Infinitely Improbable that anything would ever go wrong with any part of
the ship.

They did not realize that because of the quasi-reciprocal
and circular nature of all Improbability calculations, anything that was Infinitely
Improbable was very likely to happen almost immediately.

The Starship Titanic was a monstrously pretty
sight as it lay beached like a silver Arcturan Megavoidwhale among the laser-lit
tracery of its construction gantries, a brilliant cloud of pins and needles
of light against the deep interstellar blackness; but when it launched, it did
not even manage to complete its very first radio message – an SOS – before undergoing
a sudden and gratuitous total existence failure.